Ranked matchmaking coming to Dota 2

Ever wondered what your Dota 2 MMR is? Welp, you’ll be able to find out before too long! Sort of.

Valve are planning on adding a ranked matchmaking mode to Dota 2 in the game’s next major update, although this will be an entirely separate game mode with an entirely separate MMR. The regular matchmaking has always used MMR to set up matches with other players (or so it claims), but this new game mode will make your Dota 2 MMR visible. And for what it’s worth, MMR stands for Matchmaking Rating.

The ranked matchmaking mode is being designed for those who fancy being a bit more competitive, hence why your MMR will be visible. You’ll only be able to play this mode after around 150 completed games, so No Newbies Allowed, and you can only play in it if everyone in your party has unlocked it. It’ll only feature All Pick, Captain’s Draft, and Captain’s Mode to begin with, coaches are not allowed, and you can’t play in it when you’re in Low Priority. Oh! And your MMR will only be visible to you and your party, so while you’ll know how amazing/terrible you are, nobody else will.

This hopefully means I’ll stop getting games with people who buy Blademail as their first big item on Nature’s Prophet.

Alongside this, Valve put up a huge post explaining the science behind how the MMR system works. It mostly made me go cross-eyed, though it is worth noting that your MMR is apparently tracked separately when you’re queuing solo and queuing with a party. It’s also fairly interesting/useful to read how the game “attempts” to use your MMR to create a balanced match. It bases this off seven criteria – balance, low discrepancy between best and worst player, player experience, each team’s highest skilled player being around the same skill level, each team containing the same number of parties, player language preferences containing a common language, and keeping wait times low.

Yes, I laughed at the “player language preferences containing a common language” too.

You can read up on the way it functions for parties and the data and everything else over here, because I’m not even going to try to summarise that. It’s way too early in the morning. No word on when this mode will be coming, barring “next major update”, but I’m actually looking forward to complaining about my Dota 2 MMR so I’m hoping it won’t be too far off.